Chapter Thirty-Seven Tyler
Chapter Thirty-Seven
TYLER
SLIPPING THROUGH THE billowing curtains covering the floor-to-ceiling windows, I tread lightly over the terracotta floor.
Taking in little of the surroundings, which consist of only the bare essentials, I quickly deduce that this is a soldier’s home.
A place of refuge, void of any real life, much like my own.
Scanning every corner for one of his men, I come up just as empty as I did while searching the perimeter, just as a keen awareness creeps up my spine.
Gun drawn, I sense his presence just as he calls from a room adjacent to the kitchen. “I’m unarmed.”
Knowing I’m walking further into a deliberate trap, I quickly make peace with however this will play out.
“Pour yourself a drink,” he calls, his voice an ironic mix of contempt and mockery.
Gun poised, I step into a sitting room to find him in a centuries-old chair, fully dressed, door open in invitation.
“Expecting someone?”
“I feel this house is full enough,” he replies.
The two of us—and our grudge—taking up every bit of air in the vast space as his eyes rake me with utter hatred.
My return gaze is just as scathing. In seconds, I’m weighed, measured, judged.
His need for my death is clear in his merciless, icy blue stare.
In his eyes, I see the guarded secret Larissa held closely to her chest. One of the only lies she told me in the beginning—a question I asked her that first night in my penthouse, which now feels like lifetimes ago.
“How many of your father’s men are in love with you?”
She replied that any one of them would put a bullet in her head without pause. Looking at the man before me and his chilled, calculating expression, it’s clear why she might have thought it the truth. It’s the unmistakable mix of hatred and possessive jealousy in Alonzo’s eyes that makes it a lie.
“Where is she?”
“Where she doesn’t want to be found.”
Mere feet apart—if he’s armed, it’s an easy shot for either of us.
Though he doesn’t seem at all concerned that I might take mine as I lift my chin in prompt.
Sighing as if dealing with a petulant child, he stands and untucks his shirt from his suit pants as he speaks.
“That’s the problem with you, is it not?
You don’t take the word of anyone, man or woman. ”
His remark cuts deep, but I know he can’t see my inner flinch—only my intent. This conversation will be brief, ending in his loss of breath. But when he doesn’t stop undressing, I pause my trigger finger as he undoes the top button of his shirt.
“That will do.”
“Will it?” he scoffs, his gaze growing even more glacial. “Who the fuck are you to tell me anything?”
“The one with the fucking gun,” I snap.
“You are nothing and no one to me, Tyler, and never will be. By your gun or some other, my life won’t be made or broken by whoever takes it, fucking fool.”
“Is that some mafia logic?”
“It’s logic of a man who knows his sins and worth.
You have no right to decide mine,” he condemns, releasing the pearl-colored buttons.
“And hers? You believe you have some claim because you’ve had her heart for a time, and her body.
Playing ignorant to the fact that you lost all rights to her with your betrayal. ”
He watches my reaction and gains no satisfaction from my silence.
“I watched her grow from a young girl confused by why God could be so cruel, to a woman who fought every single day to survive it—while I protected her from that cruelty. I was the first to take her body and her heart, and I have spent the whole of my fucking life from boy to man watching over her and loving her more than any boy or man ever could.”
Shirt unbuttoned, he pulls it down his arms, then slowly turns his back to me.
The lamp light showcasing his mutilated skin.
A sea of scars that I instantly recognize as Ciro’s whip lashes.
Brutally delivered. Ripped open again and again by the same monster.
As I scour Ciro’s masterpiece, the notion strikes that he might have taken some of those scars to spare Larissa from Ciro’s wrath.
It’s the sheer number that warrants my reaction. “Jesus Christ.”
A bark of a laugh escapes him. “Doesn’t exist for me,” he mocks, pulling on his shirt and refastening his buttons. As he does, I notice the jagged scar between his thumb and forefinger is the very same one belonging to the boy in the video.
“I’m just like you!” Larissa’s words reach me, her appeal to the gatekeeper I’ve become. To understand why she couldn’t tell me everything. Because it wasn’t her lone secret to confess. She’d kept this one to protect Ciro’s other victim—Alonzo.
“I couldn’t tell you about the filth covering my skin, because I wanted so much for you to touch it and not be revulsed by me.”
Hellfire reignites at the ache that truth causes. Even if she wanted to voice the truth about what she herself endured, I shamed her from unearthing it.
Alonzo’s eyes are waiting for mine when I finally lift them.
It’s in the loaded, mute seconds that follow while he slowly refastens his buttons that it sinks in.
He’s the same type of protector I am. Just as vigilant and covert, confirming that he not only helped her survive that house but is also the reason she has so few scars.
Bile rises as he watches me surmise the truth.
“She became my religion because no God that exists would gift me my life. I’ve worshipped her for almost two decades, and you,” he spits, “now believe you have some claim or right to her.”
After fastening the last button, he walks to an antique drink cart, pouring a few fingers before sipping it slowly. “I was collected as a debt after my father was late too many times with tribute payments,” he scoffs. “Payments he could never afford.”
His glacier gaze ices my profile.
“Tributes I’ve now paid a thousand times over in servitude as Ciro’s human slave.
And even when I could have escaped, I stayed—for my family first, and then her.
I provoked him, knowing how dangerous his cravings were, to shift his wrath to me.
For Cosima. For his worthless firstborn son.
For Ignacio. To keep what innocence remained in him.
” He pushes out a burdened breath. “But for all the failures that sick fuck imagined, I paid. And for her curiosity about you, the day she followed you to Triple Falls. A whiplash that I could not save her from.”
Unable to help my flinch, his eyes light in recognition before he sips his drink and continues.
“I paid to keep her away from him and, later, to remain within reach of you. Following every order he gave—even some that hurt her—just for the chance to watch her become the woman she was meant to, while shielding her betrayal from him for one more fucking day.”
He takes a menacing step toward me before stopping himself.
“I spent my life loving the girl who became the woman you fed on and threw away like garbage.” He smashes the tumbler against the wall.
“And now you come here to declare me your enemy, an obstacle in your way—deciding one of those bullets is meant for me? For what? Protecting her? For hating every man who tries to take her from me?” He shakes his head incredulously.
“Even now, I live and breathe for her as I have every day—and the most pathetic part is that you believe this is your love story.”
Rage litters his features as he condemns me.
“Tell me, Tyler—I’m the one who paid for every breath she shared with you, paid for the beating heart you cast aside, so who is more deserving of your fucking bullet between us?
” His scathing eyes rake me. “Know this—even if you give it to me, it won’t fucking stop me from loving her. ”
“Why didn’t you fucking kill him?”
“You can’t be so na?ve,” he scoffs, shaking his head.
“But when you don’t serve a serpent whose eyes and forked tongue bind you, maybe you don’t see what it can do with its coiling tail.
” He audibly sighs. “Ciro shot my brother in the head the day he enslaved me. Left a trail of my brother’s blood with his expensive shoes across my mother’s floor before clamping my neck and leading me from my home.
My parents screaming for mercy as he promised that if retribution ever came, they’d die the same day.
I’ve seen him make that threat a dozen times—before making sure I was the one who carried them out. ”
Realization dawns. “She freed your family.”
He nods. “Two nights before you raided, they were set free. Her only request was that I save Ignacio when the time came. She called me to that clinic to see him, just once, before he was exiled to hide from you. The man she loves, but is forced to conceal her brother from.”
Larissa’s words come back to me. The fear in her eyes for her brother’s crime. “What did he do? What did Ignacio do?”
“You killed those families,” I voice aloud.
He sharply dips his chin. “Ignacio could not stomach this life. He numbed himself with drugs, so his crimes are mine. I’m the monster you seek to put down, Marine. And I assure you, I had no issue putting a bullet in your man to protect Ignacio’s freedom from you—if that’s the man you are.”
My blood boils at his dismissal of Peter even as my gut agrees with his logic.
“Would you not put a bullet into any man whose life threatened those you love? She freed me by betraying you—and still didn’t betray you.
I follow her as her shadow, as she calls me, and always will, as long as she wishes it.
If you can’t live with that, use that bullet.
But know she won’t forgive either of us for taking the other from her.
Which is the only reason you still breathe now. ”
Lifting the decanter, he pours another drink with ease as I hemorrhage with the weight of his confessions.
“My decision was made long ago,” he states, tilting his head accusingly. “The question is, do you care for her enough to let a man you hate survive, loving her? A man that she still loves.” He lifts his chin, staring down his nose at me.
“Nothing would please me more than to punish you. To erase you from her sight. But you’re not worthy of being the reason I lose her. Tell me—who will protect her if she doesn’t forgive you?”
I sink in his truth. He let me track him back to his house because he wanted this confrontation.
He wants to keep protecting her. I hate that my gut tells me to believe it.
His love and allegiance to her seeming as boundless as mine was for Delphine.
It’s with that knowledge that I lower my gun.
Feeling sick, unsure of the ground I’m standing on, I ask the only question I want an answer to.
“And if she forgives me? Allows me back into her life?”
Fury lights my veins as he absorbs my pathetic tone with mild satisfaction.
“If she wishes it, I’ll step out of her shadow for the first time and let her live her life.”
“You expect me to believe that?”
“I don’t give a fuck what you believe!” he roars. “Leave my house before I ruin us both.”
Gut boiling with the need to end him, I turn to do just that.
“So fucking arrogant,” he scoffs, taunting me. “You’re not worthy of her. At least I know that much about myself.”
“That’s where you’re wrong,” I toss over my shoulder. “That’s where I do agree with you.”
“She’s gone,” he bites at my back. “The woman we both knew is gone. Once you see her, you will know it’s the truth. That is, if she lets you survive it.”
“I’ll take my chances.”
“If you win her, you better earn her, deserve her, or let her go.”
“So she can what? Settle for you?” I whip my head back, meeting his eyes to see that’s exactly where his hope lies.
If my own history with love has taught me anything, it’s that I’ve made myself this man’s mortal enemy. If she’s harmed while with me, he’ll come for me—even if another wields the blade.
Pausing at the threshold, I give him as much as he gave me. “You harmed one of ours. I can’t and won’t protect you from them.”
“I will never need or want your fucking protection,” he seethes. “Get the fuck out of my house.”